Is there an angst gene that suddenly turns on as we approach 50? I haven’t felt this way since I was a kid, worrying every time I turned on the TV (everything in black & white back then), that this might be the moment, regular programming of The Partridge Family interrupted by a newsflash of the big flash: Nuclear war has broken out.

Now the world around me in this wet whimper of a winter seems not just ill, but carooming toward some bad end. So-called free markets enslaving the poor. People starving when there is more than enough food to feed everyone. A handful of corporations controlling food, drugs & education and therefore our very minds and bodies. Democracies throwing citizens under the corporate bus. And the economy just keeps unravelling at its plastic seams.

But there is one word that keeps me from despairing.

It captures one of those ideas that seems so obvious and and true and right when you hear it explained.

Permaculture — as in permanent human culture. It’s about designing human systems that work in harmony with nature rather than against nature because, obviously, we are a part of it. Screw nature and we screw ourselves, eventually.

Permaculture has been catching on with food growers since Aussies Bill Mollison and David Holmgren developed the idea in the mid 1970s. They said, before designing a food system, study the master, as in the most productive innovative, self-renewing designer of all time, nature. Then mimic nature, which is complex, rather than design in our own image, which tends to the self serving and simplistic.

And that’s just poking at the fecund edges of what permaculture means.

Permaculture is catching on in urban design and architecture (LEED-certified buildings being an example). It’s central in transition-times thinking, as in how to survive peak oil, peak food, peak economic meltdown.

But how do we “permaculture” the areas we work in — energy, natural resources, business, banking, online, retail, heath-care, education, travel, entertainment?

Books on the Run

This incredibly handy book let’s you take Felstead’s Yoga for Runners practice anywhere you can take a book – the park, the cottage deck, the beach. I got hooked on yoga to help me build strength and flexibility for marathon running, but don’t always have the time to get to a studio for the two or three sessions a week I crave. Felstead came to the rescue with her DVD series that took me from novice to intermediate, but saying Namaste to the TV screen wears after awhile.